Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind

National Review, June 22, 1992 by Hadley Arkes

Mr. ROGER ROSENBALTT has claimed the attention of a wide audience as an "essayist" for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and editor-at-large at Life magazine. Affecting in this book to search for a settlement of the vexing problem of abortion, he seeks guidance, in part, through an embassy to the state of Iowa. There he finds the reaction of Middle America, good folk who are, as the saying goes, "conflicted." They are thoughtful people, or at least they are given to much pondering, with little result. They are too honest to pretend that the offspring in the womb is anything other than a human child; but in Rosenblatt's account, they cannot quite bring themselves to reject even the most facile reasons that are served up as excuses for abortion. Like many other mortals, they find it hard to reason about the matter in a demanding, coherent way, especially when it touches their own interests. They cannot give a principled account of their own motives, or provide a justification for their judgments. In short, they reflect the state of mind of the writer himself. And that demonstrates, to Mr. Rosenblatt, that they are "sensible" Americans.

H. L. Mencken would have looked at the same sample and found a reflection instead of that familiar character Boobus Americanus. He would have wondered why an urbane man should look to these people as a source of instruction on any matter of moral consequence. But it is part of Mr. Rosenblatt's strategy to suggest that the urbane have no deeper resources of reflection to bring to this matter of abortion, because there is no question here, finally, that lends itself to the arts of reason. The record of embryology and genetics has apparently produced no evidence worth reckoning on the nature of that occupant of the womb. And a tradition of reflection running back two thousand years has not managed to produce any principles that would allow us to distinguish between moral arguments that are plausible and ones that are vacuous.

It is Rosenblatt's contention that every relevant scientific or moral question hinges on a matter of opinion, and no opinion claims any more sovereignty or truth than any other. The strands of this understanding are by now familiar. They supply the foundation of what for most college freshmen in this country would constitute the sum of their thought on matters philosophic. The improbable part is that they should furnish, for a seasoned writer, the premises on which he would frame an entire book.

With those premises in place, Rosenblatt offers, first, a survey of attitudes on abortion over the years, in different countries, and a sampling of the treatment of abortion in the laws of different places. But for all the effect they had on his conclusions, these pages might have been omitted altogether or replaced with something entirely different--say, the saga of the White Sox in their race to the pennant in 1959. For in Rosenblatt's hands the parade of opinions simply confirms . . . the parade of opinions. The persisting variety of opinions is taken as evidence for the absence of any truths that can settle the question and dissolve the disagreement. But of course that anchoring premise would be understood, instantly, by philosophers as a self-refuting proposition: "The presence of disagreement establishes the absence of truth." As soon as anyone registers his disagreement with that proposition, it would be enough to establish its falsity.

But the maneuver does serve the purpose of clearing from the field the pretension to any discipline of reasoning. And what it leaves is the possibility of appealing to something homespun and down to earth: the reactions of those good, plain, natural people in Iowa. What Rosenblatt distills from the brew of opinions is this sense of the matter: Most people think that abortion involves the taking of a human life, and it is not to be done for anything less than a grave or weighty reason. But they also think that life is complicated, that the circumstances of any family are so hard to judge from the outside that they are reluctant to cast judgments and lay down laws for anyone else. The result is to produce this "resolution," as Rosenblatt calls it: "permit but discourage." The notion should be conveyed to people that they should choose abortion with misgiving and strain--and perhaps even with a healthy dose of guilt--but that nothing should finally stand in the way of that choice. ("No, Hodgkins, you may still lynch blacks, but you must do it with a proper anguish, and with a sense of the immanent tragedy of life.") And now that the Supreme Court is on the threshold of overturning Roe v. Wade, this distilled wisdom expresses itself, for Rosenblatt, in this prescription: "It is time for Congress to make a law like Roe v. Wade that fully protects abortion rights but legislates the kind of community help like sex education that would diminish the practice."

This is the key, which unlocks the plan of the book and reveals the levels of deception that have been built--quite deliberately--into its design. For what Rosenblatt is endorsing, in this rearrangement of words, is not a law that "fully protects abortion rights," but a law that protects the full rights of abortion established under Roe v. Wade and its companion case of Doe v. Bolton. And what that means is a law that protects a right to abortion on demand, an abortion chosen for any reason whatsoever, through the entire nine months of the pregnancy. But nothing in that state of affairs could possibly coincide with the folksy wisdom that Rosenblatt claims to have found in the people of Iowa, or in the surveys steadily taken, over twenty years, of plain people throughout the nation.